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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t get is... why do this for a t-shirt? Am I missing something?

Couple minutes, free t-shirt, I'm sure folks say "why not?"

At the local sandwich shop folks will stand in line for an hour to get a free crappy sub $5 sandwich...

Otherwise some folks in other theads indicated that in some places, specifically india, participating in hacktoberfest and getting PRs was good for resumes and educational recognition.

Why not? If it takes 3 minutes of effort and you get to say you've been there (a developer) and you got the t-shirt.

T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.

Yeah I learned this lesson too. I run a coding education nonprofit and for years we have offered free shirts or stickers to people who bring someone totally new to coding (usually artists or musicians who want to work on a game) to one of our events in certain areas.

We tried it with an online event in August and it was immediately flooded with fake signups from people in poorer parts of the world.

(Honestly made me sad more than frustrated. But we're not equipped to give out that many shirts.)

I thought of that, but if you’re wealthy enough to watch YouTube and submit PRs on GitHub, is that really that much of a reward?

You can be pretty damn poor and do both of those things.

My entire youth could be described as having all the time in the world but not a dime to my name.

This was much of my youth too and I grew up in an upper-middle class family in the Bay Area :/ I think this would apply to most children.

I think you have this backward.

If you had to work for three months to afford your phone, would you be more likely to spend fifteen minutes to get a free shirt, or less?

* coolness, to claim that you got a T-shirt from big company.

* An entry on resume.

You don't need to be wealthy to get an internet access. You can get it at a school, a public library, a friend's home...

How's the quality of the t-shirt that one gets after completing the challenge?

It's not just the t-shirt, the guys goes on to explain how developer "swag" is something you must have, you'll feel more confident and respected if you have a tech related t-shirt.

It's really sad that a guy who teaches coding asks people to spam FOSS projects to get that so called "swag".

A lot of newer developers do it for resume reasons. I know people who have gone around doing spelling fixes to claim they contributed to stuff.

There was a bunch of this on Drupal.org awhile back, you'd get patches in the issue queue where someone just ran phpcs on the whole module.

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